Minecraft Fan Convention Set for November in Las Vegas

The game will finally make it out of beta during the two-day event.

Back in May, Mojang asked fans of Minecraft if they would be interested in attending a Minecraft convention in Las Vegas this November for about $90. In less than ten hours, more than 13,000 people said yes, 19,000 said maybe, and another 23,000 said no. Those numbers have since ballooned to over 42,000, 65,000, and 94,000, respectively. And while "no" has been the most popular answer, there's clearly more than enough interest in a fan convention devoted to the sandbox building game to make it a reality.

The convention, which is set to take place November 18 and 19 in Las Vegas, PC Gamer reports, will coincide with the release of the final build of Minecraft. The game that people have been playing is not, in fact, the finished product. It was first released in an unfinished state in 2009 and only reached beta this past December.

"For me, MineCon is about celebrating the full release of Minecraft," developer Notch told PC Gamer. "I'm really looking forward to getting up on stage and pushing the button to upload the final build."

That doesn't mean development on the game will stop; it will simply be out of beta, at long last. "We'll just go back home and keep working on Minecraft directly after MineCon, but it does represent a huge milestone where the game finally leaves beta, something we'd never been able to do without our fans, so it feels natural to celebrate it with them," Notch said.

A registration site where you can buy tickets -- which haven't been priced -- will be going online next week. The $90 that was originally cited in May was an estimate for what a ticket might cost without counting travel costs or hotel rooms.

In addition to the existing PC game, an Xperia Play version is in development, as is a Kinect-enabled Xbox Live Arcade version. The game will also eventually be coming to both iOS and Android.